Archive for the ‘Newspapers’ Category

Thursday, January 19th, 2017

I bought some items online during an after Christmas sale and almost three weeks later got a notice from the store that one of the items wasn’t available. OK. That happens. “LET US MAKE IT UP TO YOU,” came a proposal for a “gift”–$10 off a $100 purchase. This hit a sour note: It sounded like “heads they win; tails I lose.” Otherwise I like the store.

The next two examples are courtesy of the circulation departments of a magazine and newspaper considered top of the line in their categories. I subscribe to and admire both. However, they appear to be trying to save money by selecting under par fulfillment and promotion partners at just the time they need to excel.

The magazine has been nagging me to renew my subscription months early and if I do, I’ll get a free subscription as a gift. [Always suspicious, I envision losing the months I’ve already paid for, between now and the end of the original subscription, and I don’t want to waste time untangling this potential glitch.] Fine writing and elegance are just two of the magazine’s selling points and the subscription is costly. That’s why I didn’t expect to see a typo in the first word of the third line [“your”] printed on a piece of cheap scrap paper enclosed in their correspondence seeking my business. [See photo above.]

The newspaper didn’t deliver its weekend and Monday issues last week. I called customer service on Tuesday making clear that we didn’t want the credit, we wanted the newspapers. The operator [from a far-off land] said he understood. On Wednesday we received a second copy of the Tuesday issue. I called back and was told they would have to mail us the weekend and Monday copies and that this would take from seven to 10 days. I had already spent far too much time on this mistake and snapped “fine, do that,” and hung up. Still waiting.

All this reminds me of a restaurant we went to in the Berkshires years ago that served remarkable food in an enchanting setting with a terrible hostess who ran the room like a general during a military operation readiness inspection {ORI}. The tension her approach achieved added a false note to an otherwise pleasant experience. We learned later that her husband was the chef. Nevertheless, she ruined the evening.

Do you have other examples of an irritating detail that conflicted with the otherwise high quality of a product or service?

Thursday, June 4th, 2015

Spelling bee winners. Photo: businessinsider.com

Two seemingly disparate events taking place at the same time seemed related to me.

The buzz

The winning words were “scherenschnitte” and “nunatak” and the last names of the spelling bee winners, who are13 and 14 years old respectively were Shivashankar and Venkatachalam. My first irrational reaction when I saw the TV news brief was, “Whew! Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam have an advantage over many if they have spelled their last names since they were little.”

The judges called a tie for first place because they ran out of words to give the two students, from Olathe, Texas and Chesterfield, Mo., in the annual Scripps Spelling Bee in which 283 other children competed. Maxwell Tani wrote in Business Insider, on Yahoo Finance: “Loeffler has been EPSN’s go-to television analyst for the bee for a decade.” Paul Loeffler told Tani: “It’s a challenge to comment on the bee because the show is essentially split between hardcore fans and viewers who aren’t very familiar with the whole spelling bee process.” Loeffler himself competed in the contest in 1990 and his sister, who works for Scripps, was a contender three times.

All the news that’s fit to film

While these students competed for the almost $40,000 prize, a copy of Webster’s Dictionary [an example of coals to Newcastle?], and international fame, I heard last Saturday how newspaper editors in the Hudson Valley, like those around the country, are increasingly turning to video to enhance their online coverage and motivate subscribers. [I started to write “motivate readers”–them, too.] The panelists at the Millbrook Free Library, Whitney Joseph, The Millerton News, Jim Langan, Hudson Valley News, Curtis Schmidt, Northern Dutchess News, Stuart Shinske, Poughkeepsie Journaland Rex Smith, Albany Times Union, didn’t argue with someone in the audience who thought that what’s effortless is essential to win customers these days. The panel was part of the annual Millbrook Literary Festival in Dutchess County, N.Y.

Photo: Pinterest.com

Only one person in the room admitted to never reading news on the Internet when the moderator asked for a show of hands.

A high school instructor said he has a dickens of a time getting his charges to write a news story because they seem only to be able to share their opinions. The panelists empathized. Nevertheless Joseph takes on interns at the Millerton News.

Responding to a young man in the 12-15 age range who asked panelists what it took to be a news reporter Smith, from the Albany Times Union, said he looks for a person who is curious and energetic—with the stamina and imagination to run down all leads–and that writing ability is last on his list of priorities. He said he can teach someone to write.

Is there inconsistency in the public’s fervor to watch kids who spell amazingly well—enough to warrant network TV and news coverage—when at the same time video increasingly gathers pride of place over words in newspaperland?

Wednesday, September 11th, 2013

Large organizations that listen to their P.R. counsel can often work magic when things go wrong, which, of course, they inevitably do. That is what just happened at Baruch College, where I’m involved in a mentoring program. Baruch is part of the massive and complex City University of New York system, one of the most extensive and decentralized educational institutions in the state.

Baruch, as do other city and state colleges, charges students who are New York residents a significantly lower tuition than it does those from out-of-state. For some reason it had been charging tuition for a recently admitted student, Matthew Levy, a lifelong New Yorker, at the “out-of-state” rate. When Baruch caught the error, it informed Levy that in future he would be billed at the lower “residents” rate.

Not unreasonably, however, he decided to seek reimbursement of the approximately $7,000 he had overpaid and approached a clerk in the school’s admissions department to help him. The clerk told him: “Normally, if you paid, you don’t get your money back,” but that he could file an appeal, including as evidence of his New York State residency, copies of his driver’s license and voter registration card.

Matthew, no fool, went one step further. He also wrote to David Segal “The Haggler” in the Sunday New York Times Business Sectionand asked for his help to expedite the refund.

Christina Latouf, Baruch VP Communications

Segal wrote: “The Haggler contacted Christina Latouf, a spokeswoman for the college. She needed a day or two to figure out what had happened, and then she wrote something rather remarkable. In an e-mail, she said that the school not only took responsibility for stumbling blocks inserted between Mr. Levy and his refund, but also that changes would be made so that such errors don’t happen again. Those changes include working with the City University of New York — of which Baruch is part — to review out-of-state designations.

“‘Further, if a student’s initial documentation indicates they have always been a New York State resident, we will no longer request additional documentation,’ Ms. Latouf wrote.”

Segal praised Baruch for changing its system: “Do you hear that, dear readers? It is the sweet sound of modest reform, a noise as rare as the quack of the Scaly Sided Merganser.”

He continued: “‘At the heart of this case was an incorrect coding designation,’ Ms. Latouf wrote, in conclusion. ‘While we have put some measures in place (such as the one that triggered our initial outreach to Matthew), we will build and utilize new technologies to put more safeguards in place, and train staff to assure coding is accurate.’

“True, soothing and conciliatory words are cheap. But Baruch is off to a good start. Two days after the Haggler called, the school contacted Mr. Levy, and that same afternoon he e-mailed the Haggler a photograph of a document waiting for him at the bursar’s office: a check for $7,245.”

I’ve met Latouf, who is Vice President for Communications, External Relations and Economic Development at Baruch, and dashed off a note to congratulate her. She responded: “It was a lot of work, but we’re all very pleased to have been able to turn a potentially negative story into a positive.”

She did more than that: She showed the world what a well-oiled organization she works for. Who couldn’t admire the speed of the reform? Baruch includes 1,500 full time academic and administrative staff and more than 17,000 students. That someone in the administration listened to the communications VP and agreed to and implemented changes at warp speed shows trust. Like The Haggler, I think this is unusual and laudable.

Monday, April 22nd, 2013

The topic of Rick Wolff‘s radio program “The Sports Edge,” on WFAN–it focuses on children’s sports–continued to be coaches who bully, in the aftermath of the Rutgers basketball scandal. During yesterday’s show he said he’s heard of countless examples of bullying in other school and college sports programs and asked listeners to share examples.

One of the callers was a wrestling coach who admitted to losing it after he observed one of his best athletes giving up at a major tournament after the first round of three. He said he dressed down the student the next day, screaming, yelling, using the f-bomb, underscoring what a disappointment the kid was to himself and if this wasn’t bad enough, he did it in front of the team.

He said that he immediately met with the student’s parents to apologize to them and the young man and then he met with each of the families of the other team members and did the same thing.

Meanwhile, last week, Rupert Murdoch refused to apologize for the New York Post‘s decision to run images of two men who were not the Boston Marathon bombers. “On Media” Politico.comcolumnist Dylan Byers reported that the Murdoch-owned paper was the only major print publication to use the photos.

Murdoch said that as soon as the FBI changed course–it was they who had distributed the photos but it wasn’t clear that the bureau meant the media to receive them–the paper removed the photos. As Byers noted, Murdoch obviously couldn’t delete them from the already-distributed printed copies.

In a statement, wrote Byers, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Col Allan, wrote that the two men weren’t identified as suspects. The headline associated with the image: “Bag Men: Feds Seek These Two Pictured at the Boston Marathon.” The bag reference was to the bags they carried.

So what about the reputations of the young men implicated by the headline that flirted with accusation? Are they collateral damage in the quest to be first with the news so it’s OK?

I’m sure that a smart lawyer could figure out a slippery way for Murdoch or Allan to sound as though they were sorry should their coverage have given the “Bag Men” or their families a start. Maybe one of them, like the coach, will meet with the young men.

Are public figures so afraid of being sued that they won’t apologize? Or is it a macho thing? Does this attitude then filter down to the rest of us so that often vendors respond “no problem” instead of “I’m sorry” when you ask them to right a mistake? Or have some successful people forgotten that they can and do make errors and that the thing to do is to apologize?

Saturday, February 16th, 2013

David Reich writes a blog “my 2 cents,” musings on marketing, media, public relations….and life. He founded Reich Communications, a NYC-based PR and marketing company years ago. I have been lucky to work on projects with him. He rarely complains.

When he asked to share this experience, I knew we’d want to read about it because his nose for news is perfect pitch [an apt reference as he also loves jazz].

David wrote:

I get The Wall Street Journal delivered to my office every day.

I, frankly, don’t remember how much I pay for the subscription or when it expires. I recall that when I ordered it, it was a good deal, maybe something like $9.95/mo. But it’s just not one of those things I normally give much thought to.

I had a call this morning from The Journal offering me “their best deal” of $29.95/mo and I’d get two months free. So that comes to about what I seem to recall I’ve been paying per month, although maybe not such a great deal after three months.

At that moment, I didn’t remember what I’ve been paying. So I asked the nice man on the phone how much I’m now paying. He said he didn’t have that information.

I then asked him when my subscription expires. He said he didn’t have that information.

He then asked to confirm my address, and he gave me the address that I moved away from two months ago. I gave him my new address and also told him I’ve been getting the paper here at the new place since we moved. He had no information on the new address.

I then asked him how he expected me to make a purchase decision without key information that he should have – like how much I’ve been paying and how much longer my subscription is paid. He started to tell me I could call the Journal’s subscription number – 1-800 something.

But we didn’t get that far, because I politely told the guy I didn’t have time to call to get information about my account that he should have when he called me. The call wasted about four minutes of my valuable time, and it also wasted the time of the person who’s getting paid at the Journal’s call center.

Customer service? No, more like service of stupidity.

You’ve got to scratch your head, but think of all the companies that plunk staffers on the phone who have no clue beyond the script they’re given and/or are not prepped with sufficient backup information to do their jobs properly. Can you share such instances?

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

Who doesn’t want to save money, especially these days?

My friend Clotilde, [she asked me to use this pseudonym], told me about how some in one industry are approaching this objective although she didn’t cotton to the approach. Clotilde heard the story on NPR. I read David Folkenflik’s coverage in “Fake Bylines Reveal Hidden Costs Of Local News” on wbur.org.

Folkenflik wrote that major newspapers in Chicago, Houston and San Francisco admitted that they published print and/or online items under fake bylines.

That’s the least of it. According to Folkenflik, “As was first disclosed by the public radio program ‘This American Life,’ the items in question were not written by reporters on the staffs of the papers at all but by employees of what is effectively a news outsourcing firm called Journatic.

“‘How do you get police blotters from 90 towns? It’s not easy. But that’s what we do,’ says Brian Timpone, a former television reporter and small-town newspaper owner who created what became Journatic six years ago.”

Folkenflik continued, “Journatic has dozens of clients, many of them strapped for cash but all hungry to serve up local news for their readers.”

Worth repeating: I’ve found that daily newspapers are turning to syndicated stories to fill their pages rather than to spend money for reporters to cover local business news.

Back toFolkenflik: “‘It’s a short-term cost-cutting measure, and that’s all it is,’ says Tim McGuire, the former editor-in-chief of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who now teaches media business and journalism ethics at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. ‘It’s not a long-term solution to providing local news to people who want it.'”

Journatic has 60 employees and 200 freelancers but what most caught my friend’s attention was that the company hires 100+ people from abroad to write copy. One employee who rewrites the foreigners’ material told Folkenflik that these writers are paid “a pittance.”

Since I began to write this post, the Chicago Tribune, a Journatic client, suspended its relationship when it learned that “the company had published stories with fake bylines and that a writer there had plagiarized a story on TribLocal, the network of suburban papers and hyperlocal websites Journatic published on behalf of Tribune,” according to Julie Moos on pointer.org. The Tribune has brought in a former editor as a consultant to help “the outsourcing company on its processes and standards.”

Are cut-rate solutions like this better than nothing? Do you think such cost-cutting measures will help save newspapers?

Monday, July 9th, 2012

If I bought Bloomingdale’s or Macys, would I change the name to B’s or M’s or at all?

I have trouble remembering the name of NYC bridges when the city fathers and mothers name them after somebody instead of leaving them as I’ve known them–Triboro now Robert F. Kennedy; 59th Street now Ed Koch. The same with buildings: I still think “Pan Am” when others mention MetLife.

So I stopped to write this post when I learned that Rupert Mudoch is considering changing the name of The Wall Street Journal to WSJ. Is he that enamoured of Tweets?

I know about shortening names. Much of my American family called me JM and then many on the French side did and in first grade, I chose Jeannie instead of Jeanne-Marie because I hated being called “Gee-Anne Mary.” The mouthful, pronounced correctly or not, was so much longer than anyone else’s name. But I wasn’t a brand with an internationally recognizable logo.

In TheNew York Times’ “Behind the Scenes, Behind the Lines” column, Christine Haughney wrote “Murdoch Isn’t the First to Consider Renaming The Wall Street Journal.” The history, according to Haughney: “In 1946, a Princeton, N.J., polling firm concluded that that name was a handicap to the newspaper’s growth, and no part of the name was spared. As recounted by Richard F. Tofel in ‘Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism,’ ‘Both ‘Wall Street’ (with its narrowly financial and Eastern connotations) and ‘Journal’ (evocative of magazines) were said to be problematic.'”

She continued: “This assessment came as Mr. Kilgore was in the midst of guiding The Journal to its stature as one of the nation’s leading newspapers. The names editors considered included World’s Work, The North American Journal and, um, Business Day, Mr. Tofel writes. (That last one has a familiar ring to it.) A former editorial page editor, William Grimes, suggested The National Journal. Kenneth Hogate, Mr. Kilgore’s boss at the time, wanted to call it Financial America.”

When Kilgore became editor and took control–Hogate, who liked the name change idea, had died– he dropped the subject which he didn’t think a good one, Tofel told Haughney.

What do you think of a name change for The Wall Street Journal? What do you think of name changes in general?

Monday, June 25th, 2012

This post is about marketing.

I worry about the newspaper industry for more than the obvious reasons: Shrinking readership, slashed editorial budgets, the good reporters are melting away, little competition and negligible investigative reporting. I think many publishers are following a shortsighted, sure-to-fail marketing strategy that I’ve watched others try, one that has landed others facedown in the mud with a splat.

Why?: “A flood of excess advertising space, the rise of electronic advertising exchanges that sell ads at cut-rate prices, and the weak U.S. economy are all contributing to the slowdown, publishing executives and observers say.”

The electronic advertising exchange concept alarms me the most. The rationale behind using them reminds me of the advent of the 800 numbers. Manufacturers bemoaned them for selling their goods at cut-rate prices. [I wondered: “How did your brand get there and did you have no control over this?”] There were severe discounting strategies and licensing frenzies. Some sold goods with their brands posted prominently at both big boxes and boutiques, the former versions of inferior quality. This demeaned their brands leading to the demise of many. In addition, why would anyone pay full freight for a product that was available at umpteen places for half price or less?

Back to the advertising exchanges, Saba explained that they: “…are electronic platforms that allow buyers to bid on and purchase advertising space at drastically reduced prices. Many websites — not just newspaper sites — rely on these exchanges to sell unclaimed advertising spots, known in industry parlance as excess inventory. The thinking is it’s better to get something than nothing at all.”

Saba continued, “But it also trains ad buyers to expect lower advertising prices. ‘It’s like a publisher trying to sell me an Armani suit for $3,000 but I can walk around the corner and buy it from Google for 90 percent less,’ said Shawn Riegsecker, chief executive of Centro, an agency that specializes in buying and selling digital ads, and counts many newspapers as its clients.”

With the strategy of cavernous discounts and helter skelter product placement, manufacturers lost sight of the value–and sizzle–of their lifeblood. Try to Google images for “wallpaper” and you’ll not see a slice of the decorative kind–just the electronic variety. I cringe to see newspapers follow the same destructive path.

What can stop this spiral? What other product lines or industries have been destroyed by deep dish discounting and sloppy marketing?

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

I continue to see people on trains, subways, in our apartment house [as evidenced by piles left outside front doors for garbage pickup] and in the library who read magazines and newspapers. There is increasing evidence that while the print patient is sick, not all of it is on life support.

My observations are anecdotal, for sure. But take a gander at some of the things I’ve read lately:

From the Wallets of Billionaires

Warren Buffet told The Daily Beast‘s Howard Kurtz why he has and continues to buy newspapers: “‘It’s not a soft-headed business decision,’ the 81-year-old investor tells me from his Omaha office.” Kurtz continued: “In putting his considerable money where his mouth is-Buffett’s company is in the process of buying 63 Media General newspapers for $142 million-the chief executive is challenging the widespread belief that the industry is trapped in a death spiral.” The papers he’s after “have to serve smaller markets where there is ‘more of a feeling of community,'” wrote Kurtz.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg reads eight traditional newspapers a day and says “he prefers magazines the old fashioned way, despite having an iPad,” according to news aggregator Mediabistro.com, covering posts in VentureBeat and FishbowlNY. The news sources remind us that most of Bloomberg’s fortune has been made in the digital news and data service businesses.

Fashion and Beauty’s Youth Appeal

And print isn’t just for old fogies. In Adweek, Emma Bazilian recently covered statistics to prove the point in “Condé Nast Finds Magazine Readership Growing Among Millennials.” Note: I was confused by the word “millennial” in the title as the youngest of the millennials, who can be as old as 37, is 23 yet the article spotlights readers in the 18 to 24 age range.

Nevertheless, “Fashion and beauty magazines attract about 50 percent more young readers than they did in 2001, and while young women typically ‘grew out’ of these titles fairly quickly as they aged, they now read these magazines long after they leave their mid-20s.”

Bazilian continued, “Men’s magazines also gained ground with the 18-to-24 set, thanks to the addition of lad mags like Maxim and the ‘phenomenal growth’ of male fitness titles such as Men’s Health.” Bazilian was quoting Scott McDonald, svp of market research for the publisher.

Not surprising, the pulse for women’s service and news magazines is increasingly weak. The former, according to the article, didn’t keep up with the fact that most of their readers no longer stay at home and millenials turn to the Internet for news.

Mobility

Then there’s Tracie Powell, in Poynter, who wrote “Consumers aren’t rushing to replace their magazine and newspaper subscriptions with mobile news products, according to a new survey by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.”

Her article, “Survey: Mobile users as likely to be print news subscribers as non-mobile users,” continued “The survey shows that although nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults use at least one mobile device per day, nearly equal percentages of mobile media device users and non-users – 39.8 percent and 40.2 percent respectively–said they still subscribed to at least one newspaper or news magazine, which suggests users of smartphones and tablets aren’t abandoning print media.”

So where are you on the life of print? Am I looking at mortally wounded vehicles of communication and sources of information, placing hope on the thinnest strands of signs of life? Will the publishing industry–and some of the billionaires who continue to enjoy holding paper when they read–find ways to save print?

Friday, September 10th, 2010

The strangest things make it to the top of the news pile and even though I’ve been related to this business most of my life, I’ll never understand why some big news lands on page 12 or on the cutting room floor and how insignificant tidbits stagnate in headlines and on the tips of talk show host lips for days and weeks.

I’m thinking of the Quran-burning Reverend Terry Jones. [Quran is the new spelling of Koran, I’ve read.] How did he get heard to begin with? Slow news period? A fellow like this with few credentials and an insignificant following who is up to no good would hardly get the ear of the editor of a weekly in most towns. Had he burned Qurans in Florida on September 11, who would have known-10 of his 50 congregants? Yikes: The Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates is involved. Next, Jones will make millions on a book and no doubt will run for office. He’s so successful in getting out his message and [hateful] brand that he could join a PR/marketing agency.

Does the photographer Andres Serrano ring any bells? He’s known for “Piss Christ,” an image with a crucifix in a glass container filled with urine. He shot it in 1987, according to Wikipedia. It has appeared in exhibits around the country. Read much about an outrage? Heard any famous people chime in? Neither did I.

Remember Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a painting that was part of the exhibit called “Sensation”? The painting, featuring dung on the Virgin Mary, went unnoticed in London but when it was hung at The Brooklyn Museum from fall 1999 to early 2000, some, such as Mayor Giuliani, protested while others shrugged.

To lighten up a bit, I’ll close by reminiscing about a grownup game of telephone with huge impact that closed offices in New York City within a matter of hours. It happened in the 1980s, years before email and cell phones. Staff in skyscrapers at companies large and small told their bosses that they had heard from friends in other companies that their offices were closing early due to a forecast of dangerously high winds described by meteorologists in feverish weather reports. I was one of the many directed to leave work early that day. When I returned to the usually windy street near my then apartment, my hair barely moved–the air was so calm. I remember thinking, “Why can’t I get my client’s messages to move around NYC this fast?”

Two examples of public disrespect of one religion hardly make a ripple. Any ideas why? It’s enough to make one think that only victims who are bullies get any attention around here.

Please share instances of big stories that generated small play or stories–and people–blown up far bigger than they should be by media. Tell us about local news that you’ve seen take off, fueled by unwarranted panic.